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Attachmate gets more money if Microsoft gets more money. Microsoft will not sue, but Attachmate can. There is no Novell to defend itself. 15,5 billion dollars is enough to withstand IBM.

Now @BlackStar; Linux will earn them nothing. A Microsoft desktop monopoly will earn them a shitload of money. If I didn't care about FLOSS then I know what I would do.

Alternatively, since Novell sponsored development of Linux may stop, Attachmate could bogus sue Red Hat to death, stopping their development too. Attachmate might not win, but damage can be done. Red Hat's commercial marketing and the only valuable Linux certification stops too. Not to mention Red Hat Linux being the only cerified Linux OS on the planet, stopping serious business adoption, total government adoption and an go to icon in its tracks.

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Attachmate gets more money if Microsoft gets more money. Microsoft will not sue, but Attachmate can. There is no Novell to defend itself. 15,5 billion dollars is enough to withstand IBM.

Now @BlackStar; Linux will earn them nothing. A Microsoft desktop monopoly will earn them a shitload of money. If I didn't care about FLOSS then I know what I would do.

Alternatively, since Novell sponsored development of Linux may stop, Attachmate could bogus sue Red Hat to death, stopping their development too. Attachmate might not win, but damage can be done. Red Hat's commercial marketing and the only valuable Linux certification stops too. Not to mention Red Hat Linux being the only cerified Linux OS on the planet, stopping serious business adoption, total government adoption and an go to icon in its tracks.

Why would a VC trio sue Red Hat? If they are indirectly, ehm, encouraged by Microsoft, you can bet the FTC will fall upon them like a flock of hungry crows.

Besides, what's there to sue about? The IP went to Microsoft, not Attachmate (more on that below). Attachmate may or may not have got the Unix trademark (I think Novell sold that back in 1996 or so, but I'm not sure) but that's not an issue (GNU's not Unix ;-).) They also got the source code for SUSE, Mono et al and that's about it. Most of this is safe (MIT/X11 and (L)GPL) and Red Hat doesn't use Novell's closed stuff anyway.

What's more worrying is the IP transfer from Novell to Microsoft. In short, Microsoft bought 882 patents from Novell (that's their whole portfolio, give or take a few), which is bound to cover some juicy bits. Now, Microsoft's intent is unclear here, and that's kinda worrying. My guess is they will be used in the mobile patent clusterfuck (Apple vs Google/Android vs Blackberry vs new Win7Mo) and might prove useful against Oracle in the not-too-distant future.

It is also possible that we will see some strengthened FUD against Linux but a direct attack is highly unlikely.

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What's more worrying is the IP transfer from Novell to Microsoft. In short, Microsoft bought 882 patents from Novell (that's their whole portfolio, give or take a few), which is bound to cover some juicy bits.

Hmm... The statement reads "Novell also announced it has entered into a definitive agreement for the concurrent sale of certain intellectual property assets to CPTN Holdings LLC".
Found the exact figure you mentioned first here.
That's very creepy... Taken from here:

For the record, there are no court filings for CPTN or any record of the consortium until today.

So... Another patent troll?

Gonna have to wait till the dust settles I guess...

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Hmm... The statement reads "Novell also announced it has entered into a definitive agreement for the concurrent sale of certain intellectual property assets to CPTN Holdings LLC".
Found the exact figure you mentioned first here.
That's very creepy... Taken from here:

So... Another patent troll?

Gonna have to wait till the dust settles I guess...

Maybe, maybe not. I guess not, at least for the near future.

About those 882 patents being their whole portfolio:

Originally posted by http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1878860&cid=34307338

NOVL has now filed its 8K. The IP deal is for 882 patents.

A quick search of the Patent-Pair Assignment database indicates that this likely every "friggin" patent Novell owns. That is Patent-Pair has 1711 entries with Novell as an assignee, but since these include duplicate application and granted patents, as well as other stuff, the total patents sold down the river to Redmond likely represents everything touched by Novell.

Unfortunately, you have to be a registered lawyer to access the database so I cannot verify the number myself.

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After reading the wikipedia entry of the Attachmate corporation, I am not very amused that this corporation buys the most parts of Novell

This corporation is the largest private Software corporation in Washington. They produce monitoring and security software among other software types.
I guess this corporation has a bright future with those huge cyberwar spendings in the US

There is a threat here, but it has nothing to do with the Unix copyrights. We have already established really, really well that the Unix copyrights are irrelevant at this late date. They can't be used like patents to enforce against other similar works. They were released under an unterminating BSD license and covered by a government standard. Forget them.

What they got was 481 patents that were part of a portfolio that Open Invention Network had previously used to defend Linux against patent suits. So, this is escalation in the patent war they are running against Linux, because they just removed one of our defensive weapons.